Anna Reading

Artist Anna Reading shares one piece of advice that every artist should know, her experience winning the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award and recollects the first piece of artwork she remembers making for our next Mixing It Up episode.

"Combining mixtures of surplus materials in my work, I clutch, wedge and bind matter into new embraces. Commonly the works hold excess items from industrial processes, such as oyster shells surplus from pearl farming, and lumps of asphalt extracted from road surfaces. Layers of protection are built up on the works, akin to exoskeletons and armour, drawing this industrial matter into the skin. Processes of layering and combining materials are left visible for the works to exist in a state of becoming.

My work celebrates possibilities for growth and survival within hostile environments, across human and non-human worlds. Rooted in experiences of vulnerability and exposure, the works emulate forms of protection and shelter such as shells, or architectural renders. Recently I have been making hollow shells for cormorants, foxes and weeds, wild beings who can endure existence within the stark sprawl of London."

Anna Reading (she/her) is a London based Artist (b. Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK). She is a graduate of MfA Sculpture at Slade School of Fine Art (2017), where she received the Siva-Finestone Scholarship and BA Fine at Central St Martins (2010). In 2018 she won the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award. She has held artist residencies at Academy for Visual Arts, Hong Kong and Non-Space in Aarhus, Denmark. In 2022 she received a commission to create a public artwork for Lewisham High Street, due to be unveiled in 2024.

Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition, Brute, at The Shuck in Letchworth Garden City (2022), Still Here: Women in Abstract Sculpture at APT Gallery, London (2023), The Auguries at Informality Gallery, Henley on Thames (2021), The Plot at Contemporary Sculpture Fulmer (2021) and MTSA solo show, The Pothole, touring to Standpoint Gallery, London, (2019) Cross Lane Projects, Kendal (2019) and Bury Art Museum (2020). She is an Associate Lecturer at University of the Arts London teaching Sculpture at CCW and Socially Engaged Practice at CSM.